Of Nixon, Kennedy and Shooting the Moon

By William Safire

Published: July 17, 1989

WASHINGTON—
What a weekend it was in the White House, 20 years ago, when man first landed on the moon and Ted Kennedy drove off the bridge.

I was then a Nixon speechwriter who had been working on a most minor part of the space program: the sign the Apollo 11 astronauts would leave on the moon. NASA had submitted: ''Here men from the planet Earth / first landed on the moon / July 1969 A.D. / We come in peace for all mankind.''

The word landed had been troubling us because the C.I.A. suspected the Soviets had landed an unmanned vehicle (we learned much later that the Soviet probe had crashed). At a meeting in Peter Flanigan's West Wing office, Pat Buchanan suggested ''set foot,'' which solved the problem.

''We come in peace'' sounded to me like the sort of thing you'd say to Hollywood Indians. At least change the tense, I argued, so that the message would not seem to be directed to lunar inhabitants; the fix was made to ''came in peace.''

We left ''July 1969 A.D.'' intact because it was a shrewd way of sneaking God in: the use of the initials for anno Domini, ''in the year of our Lord,'' would tell space travelers eons hence that earthlings in 1969 had a religious bent; piously, we made sure that a Bible with both Testaments was included in the spacecraft's cargo.

What should the President say to the astronauts in his phone call to the moon? Frank Borman, our liaison with the astronauts, brought the image-making up short with, ''You want to be thinking of some alternative posture for the President in the event of mishaps.'' To blank looks at this technojargon, he added, ''like what to do for the widows.'' Suddenly we were faced with the dark side of the moon planning. Death, if it came, would not come in a terrible blaze of glory; the greatest danger was that the two astronauts, once on the moon, would not be able to return to the command module.

In that event, with no rescue possible, the men would have to bid the world farewell and ''close down communication'' preparatory to suicide or starvation. It would hardly advance the cause of space exploration to force a half-billion viewers and listeners to participate in the agony of their demise. I prepared an appropriate statement about men who came in peace and stayed to rest in peace, holding it in my desk drawer in case of tragedy.

What none of us expected was editorial flak about the newly elected President signing the plaque and congratulating astronauts over the phone on behalf of all Americans. We underestimated the resentment of Kennedy partisans; Presidents Kennedy and Johnson launched and encouraged the space program, grumped The New York Times, and it was ''unworthy'' for President Nixon to ''share the stage'' with the astronauts merely because he was in the White House ''by accident of the calendar'' at its fruition. The Washington Post added that Nixon should not have signed the plaque because the moon shot was no ordinary public works project.

The President ignored this not only because he enjoyed offending these editorialists but because he planned to use the American space triumph to override the public preoccupation with Vietnam. He would follow his trip to the splashdown in the Far Pacific by a return through Europe, where he would plot with Rumania's Ceausescu about an approach to China.

The speechwriters didn't know about that; we did detect, however, the irony in the Kennedy family claim to attention on that Sunday, July 20, as Apollo 11 neared touchdown.

Buchanan and I were watching the tickers in the White House, updating the information for the President's phone call, when the first news appeared of an accident involving Senator Edward Kennedy and a passenger at a small bridge near Edgartown, Mass. In a flat voice, Pat told one of the news summary aides to keep an eye on the clips to ''see if the passenger was a girl.''

That night, watching the moon landing at home, poking my 5-year-old son awake every few minutes so he could tell his children he saw the great event, I heard Walter Cronkite say the landing site would be near the Sea of Tranquillity. It struck me that the President could use that phrase, and I called the White House duty officer to pass on to Mr. Nixon the tranquillity theme.

Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin landed, pranced about on the moon, made history, and took a call from the President that began with that thought. I felt the thrill peculiar to White House speechwriters: in this case, my message had gone a quarter-million miles. Unfortunately, my son had drifted off.

President Nixon called me a few minutes after midnight: ''Well, I got in your tranquillity line . . . important, especially in view of the Rumanian trip.'' I said the rocket had blasted off from Cape Kennedy and the splashdown would be near Johnson Island and some people begrudged Nixon a phone call. He laughed and then said soberly, ''You know, this is quite a day on another front, too.''

I suggested that the news of the Kennedy accident would be buried in the excitement of the moon landing, but Nixon disagreed: ''The fact that it happened this day could make it even more significant, especially the way they're trying to make this a Kennedy day. Strange . . .''

He was right about that. In the long reach of history, the moon landing will be a milestone and Chappaquiddick a footnote, but in the effect on this generation the reverse is true. The moon walk was a spike of triumph for mankind (we'd have to say humankind now), but the death of Senator Kennedy's passenger prevented him from being President of the United States from 1976 to 1984, with all the difference in national direction a Kennedy restoration would have meant.

On a formal occasion a few weeks later, the stricken and stonewalling Senator came to the White House and Nixon took him aside for a 10-minute pep talk; I did not overhear it, but these were Nixon's notes on an anticipated news conference question about Kennedy's subsequent defeat as majority whip: ''A man is not finished when he's defeated. He's finished when he quits.''

Twenty years later, space exploration is on a back burner; Senator Kennedy is hanging in there as a liberal outpost in the Senate; Richard Nixon, not finished, is preparing to go to China in six weeks to help reopen his closing opening.

And I, presuming to be a word maven, have been sternly informed that A.D. must always precede and never follow the date. My guilt is on the grand scale: I had a hand in the first sign to be placed by earthlings on another celestial body, and it contains a glaring grammatical error.